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The first aren't even built yet, but [Elon Musk] already has big plans for his company's spacecraft, which includes turning humans into an interplanetary species with a presence on Mars. He crunched some of the numbers he has in mind on Twitter on Thursday.
Musk doesn't just want to launch a few intrepid souls to Mars, he wants to send a whole new nation. He tossed out a goal of building 100 Starships per year to send about 100,000 people from Earth to Mars every time the planets' orbits line up favorably.
A Twitter user ran the figures and checked if Musk planned to land a million humans on Mars by 2050. "Yes," . The SpaceX CEO has suggested this sort of . This new round of tweets give us some more insight into how it could be done, though "ambitious" doesn't do that timeline justice. Miraculous might be a more fitting description.
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fans, rejoice. there will be plenty of jobs on Mars. When asked how people would be selected for the Red Planet move, , "Needs to be such that anyone can go if they want, with loans available for those who don't have money." So perhaps you could pay off your SpaceX loans with a sweet terraforming gig.
Terraforming the planet should be easy if Quaid can get past Cohagen and start the reactor.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday January 19 2020, @05:08PM (4 children)
You also get dust storms that last for months and cut the amount of solar energy arriving at the surface way down. Long term they're going to need something like nukes to supply steady energy.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday January 20 2020, @07:50AM (3 children)
That's an excellent point, which might be addressed here. [universetoday.com]. The gist is that if somebody is there to clean the panels the dust is less of a problem, and that you can avoid most of the dust storms by avoiding the regions that have stormy climates. Initially though, you'd probably want a few RTGs too. You'd want more power than you need, and to use the excess power to store energy somehow. Perhaps we'll be able to split H2O, or some other molecule we find, or maybe even some day we'll manufacture batteries there. Then we'll be able to explore the stormy parts of Mars more easily.
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(Score: 2) by dry on Monday January 20 2020, @06:36PM (2 children)
Remember when Mariner 9 arrived at Mars and the whole planet was covered with dust with only the peak of Olympus Mons visible for months? I wonder how much light reaches the surface during one of these planet wide storms that seem to happen on average, every 3rd year. Being able to wipe the panels will help but there has to be reduced power output.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Dust_storms [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 24 2020, @08:46PM (1 child)
Production will certainly be reduced - but that's why you install way more generating capacity than you need for survival, and then dial back fuel production, expansion, and other energy-intensive objectives during the storms.
Nuclear will no doubt eventually play a major role, but right now NASA's kilopower reactors are pretty much the only realistic option on that front, and even the high-end 10kW reactor isn't all that impressive when it comes to powering a colony. I mean that's what, a 10x10m solar array? Well, maybe 3 or 4x that once you factor in the continuous energy production. Maybe 2-3x that during dust storms.... probably a good supplement, but they'd look a lot better if almost all that 10x100m solar area couldn't be ultralight mylar reflectors concentrating power onto relatively small panels. Without meaningful wind* or other weather, you don't need anything like the structural supports and durability you'd need on Earth - just abrasion resistance for the sandblasting.
* Mars does sometimes see some really high wind speeds during storms, but they mostly top out around 60MPH, and the *force* of the wind depends on the mass as well as the speed of the air, with Force= speed^2*Air_mass. At 1% the pressure of Earth's atmosphere, a 60MPH Martian wind will hit with roughly the same force as a 6mph Earth wind.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday January 24 2020, @09:15PM
Good points. Another advantage of solar is it can be close to where needed, stringing up power lines seems difficult on Mars.